Hands up all of you who have encountered the {bleep}ing {bleep} piece of {bleep} {bleeeeeep} dialog "The Clipboard cannot be emptied. Another program might be using the Clipboard" when using Active Forms in Excel? I know that some people have. Let us be clear; this is not a TM1 thing. On this one, IBM is not to blame. Look in the Microsoft Community and there are literally pages of posts from people who have had the problem and have never even heard of TM1.

What is less well known is that the Microsoft Office team does in fact have a feedback site. It's the equivalent of finding a set of development plans on display "in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'", but believe it or not it actually exists. And apparently, APPARENTLY the Office team sometimes listens to the suggestions.

So for all those whose lives are made a rectal pain by this dialog, I do humbly beseech you to add your votes (you do need to provide an e-mail address to register to vote, if you can live with that) to this suggestion:https://office.uservoice.com/forums/285 ... ard-cannot
and let's see whether we can actually make a difference.

(While you're there, if you hate the removal of the Recent Folders list in Office 2016 as I do then this one is probably worth a vote as well: https://office.uservoice.com/forums/285 ... e-recent-p
Both of these are in the "General" section but that seems to be the only one that exists.)

There is a language site called Duolingo. In theory it's for learning languages, in reality it blows as a learning platform but it's really good for practicing what you learn elsewhere and maybe expanding your vocabulary. Number of learners on that site per language (total since the site started, not necessarily active)?

Spanish, 69.1 million. You can probably thank the US high school system for a lot of those.

French: 41.3 million But that would include me, who pretty much gave up on French for reasons best explained in this video. I wouldn't go so far as to say that the video is "NSFW" but there is one scene just after the two minute mark that may be misinterpreted if someone was looking over your shoulder in a work meeting, so watch at your own risk. It's so outstandingly funny though (especially for anyone who knows any French at all) that it's worth it.

Esperanto, 562K learners but I'll betcha that the overwhelming majority are like me who did the first couple of units to get some idea of what the language was like and didn't have the first intention of learning it. Because after all, why would you put that effort in when even by the best estimates the total number of people you could speak it to represent less than a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the world's population?

That said... I suspect that the Esperanto vote is like an amplified version of the one above. The TM1 community is less tight than it was, but still fairly concentrated and most members of it will be affected by that dialog when using active forms at some time or another. (Except maybe Wim, who hates and avoids active forms but voted for it anyway.)

In the Esperanto community... I'll betcha that pretty much everybody who speaks the language knows pretty much everyone else (or are at least part of the same Faceplant group), so organising a voting campaign for something like this is probably easy. After all, the vast majority of the world's population can't understand them when they talk, so they may as well talk to each other. (Especially given the effort that people have to put in to learn a language that hardly anyone will have been exposed to in childhood.) And let's be honest... it doesn't discount the possibility of someone in the Esperanto community gaming the system as well. Yes, you have to enter an e-mail address, but the site does not seem to validate that address. At three votes a pop, if someone is dedicated enough they can rack up quickly. Though I imagine that the MS devs may be less inclined to act on a request with x hundred votes if x-1 hundred came out of the same IP address.

That's a good site. It's better than the incumbents like Rosetta Stone and Babbel at dealing with the challenges of rough - rather than exact - translation. Also seems to have a decent Dutch capability, which is really hard to find. Hartelijk bedankt!

Please do not send technical questions via private message or email. Post them in the forum where you'll probably get a faster reply, and everyone can benefit from the answers.Jodi Ryan Family Lawyer